Tag Archives: Dilworth

(The writer of this blog wishes to apologize to Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, the original writers of the song for borrowing this song line for this blog entry – full credit will be below)

Saturday nights in Charlotte before WBTV went on the air in 1949 meant that you had a couple of choices to take your significant other. You could take them to a swanky restaurant in the Barranger, Selwyn or Charlotte Hotels, or if you belong to the Charlotte City Club or the local country clubs you could go there. If you couldn’t afford to do that or you didn’t belong to those clubs, you could take her to the movies.

For a town the size of Charlotte, we had plenty of theatres to choose from. In the Uptown area we had the Carolina Theatre on North Tryon Street near 6th:

Facade of the Carolina Theatre 1927. Photo courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.

There was the Imperial Theatre on the South Side of the Square located on South Tryon Street and the Charlotte Theatre located on West Trade Street. If you lived out in the neighborhoods of Dilworth, Myers Park and Midtown, you had your choices of the Dilworth located on South Boulevard, the Center on East Morehead Street and the Charlottetown Mall Theatre located across the street from Midtown Mall.

But because this was also the age of Jim Crow, they had to build separate theatres for African Americans. In the Brooklyn neighborhood of Second Ward, they had the Savoy and the Lincoln and the Grand on Beatties Ford Road near Johnson C. Smith University.

While making sure I got my facts straight for this blog entry, I found this website, which talks about movie theatres that are open, closed or demolished and has them sorted by state. You can find Cinema Treasures at http://cinematreasures.org. Now, for the song that I used as my title for this blog entry:

The Drifters “Saturday Night at the Movies” byBarry Mann and Cynthia Weil, written in 1964, released as a single by Atlantic Records.

The images that I used were obtained from:

The Carolina Theatre – from the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library Image Collection. The photo of the Savoy Theatre is from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Properties Commission via Google Images.

No I am not kidding, I was looking for anything that may give me a clue as to the location of Wream Field, home of the Charlotte Hornets from 1908-1948 before the owners built Crockett Park (another lost treasure, which I will explore in another article) when I found this on a 1935 Charlotte City Map:

Okay, most of us are familiar with street naming, like Avenue, Street, Boulevard, and even some alleys from the early days of Charlotte but this one threw me for a loop. Located in Dilworth, which is one of Charlotte’s earliest suburbs, similar to Myers Park was a planned neighborhood with wide winding streets with names such as Berkley, Romany and Buchanan centered around Latta Park, named for Edward Dilworth Latta, Founder and President of the 4C’s Company (Charlotte Consolidated Construction Company) and designed by the Olmsted brothers, one of the first architects and city planners who also designed Central Park in New York City.

Now known as Belgrave Place, it runs between Berkley Avenue and Romany Road ending at Latta Park. Like many streets in Dilworth it is a tree lined peaceful street with speed humps and large houses of which many were built around the turn of the last century with some modern built homes which for the most of them they were designed to fit into the neighborhood.

Belgrave Place. Image courtesy of Google Earth 2015

If you want to learn more about the Dilworth Neighborhood, Edward Latta or about how our neighborhoods got started, please check out:

Sorting out the New South City by Dan Morrill (1998 University of North Carolina Press). This can be ordered at Park Road Books located in the Park Road Shopping Center. Written by the Historian at the Levine Museum of the New South located on North College Street, this was actually his doctoral dissertation and is a well written and through look at how Charlotte’s neighborhoods were shaped not only by geography, but politics and history.